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Breaking Character for the First Time in His Life

THOSE who have doubts about the pressures that only children in immigrant families face just need to see Raúl Esparza imitating Mother. That’s mother with a capital M because Mr. Esparza’s mother, born in Cuba and shipped out at 14 to make her own way in the world, is theatrical and bossy enough to be a Sondheim character herself.

Consider that Mr. Esparza, just turned 36, is the star of “Company,” one of the most anticipated Broadway revivals of the season. It doesn’t even open till Wednesday, and already Mother is on him about the next step.

“She says now you’re going to have to get some work in a TV show,” Mr. Esparza says in his dressing room, taking a break from the stuff that is tearing him apart, though of course this is part and parcel of the stuff that is tearing him apart. “I said, ‘You don’t mean that.’ What I’m hearing is: Your name over the marquee in a Sondheim show on Broadway is not enough. And you kind of internalize that.”

He’s laughing, riffing: “Well, I guess I could be king of France, ’cause it’s not good enough to be the president of the United States. I’m going to orbit Mars. Why not three times?”

Raúl Esparza: No longer truly married but not entirely separated, whose romantic conflicts go far deeper than that of the character he plays and have no easy fix.

His dressing room suite is done all in beige, the better to soothe. To make it more so, Mr. Esparza dims the lights. There’s the comforting sound of the little electrical waterfall and Bill Evans’s mellow jazz, though how much this helps is difficult to say. Broadway denizens may remember Mr. Esparza for a confrontation with Rosie O’Donnell when he had a featured role in “Taboo” and she was the producer, but there’s no hint of a difficult guy now.

You meet instead a funny, self-deprecating man who arrives in jeans and an old sweater and kicks off his shoes. He starts out a little fast and nervous; joking about his star dressing room; saying that in Cincinnati, where he won raves for this production earlier this year, his character wore Hugo Boss and here he wears Armani, not that he can see the difference. He talks about those windows to the actor’s heart, the photos on the makeup mirror. That’s the grandmother who raised him; that’s Michele, whom he married at 23, on their honeymoon.

But he gets to the stuff that’s been tearing him up, the stuff that most leading men would never discuss, pretty early, almost as if he wants to make a public statement. He’s been reading a book that suggests sitting quietly for 10 minutes a day and just seeing what feelings come up, he says, and “basically, there’s a lot of sadness underneath, sadness and anxiety.”

Photo

Raúl Esparza, who plays Bobby in the new production of Company, says the emotions raised in the musical have a particular meaning for him.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Why is that?

“Michele and I are separated,” he says. “It’s the end of something I thought was going to be perfect. She’s my best friend, I’ve known her since high school.” They’ve been separated, on and off, he says, since he came to New York in 2000; they even went for divorce papers once, in Miami, but couldn’t go through with it. He can’t get away from the feeling that he’s doing something wrong, disappointing other people, particularly their families.

“Life has been very complicated,” Mr. Esparza says. “I’ve been very unsure of things since I came to New York. I was terrified that I would never work here, that I would be starving and useless. Then all those things that happen to an actor. Issues of sexual identity too.”

He says those issues, which first arose in college, “shook the core of who I was.”

“So many artists I admire are bisexual,” he says. “I knew a lot of gay men growing up. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it as long as it was someone else, but not me.”

Mr. Esparza grew up in Miami. His father was an engineer, from a family of engineers; his mother was always working, as interior designer, banker or travel agent. The family moved a lot, and his parents fought. Mr. Esparza’s maternal grandmother, America García Pell, moved in with the family when he was 5, and it was she who provided unconditional love. Mr. Esparza attended the Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, which stressed service to the community. He liked girls. He wanted to be a lawyer. But while still in high school he started acting professionally, and his parents encouraged him to pursue that. Perhaps because they had lost so much leaving Cuba, he says, they understood that life was short and you should do what you love.

Then he went to New York for his sophomore year in college and everything changed. He fell in love with a male instructor at New York University, a composer, who was only a few years older. After Mr. Esparza graduated, it was this instructor who helped him get an audition in Chicago at the Remains Theater Company, which resulted in a job.

“He was tough and impossible and manipulative and brilliant and really inspired and believed I’d be a big star,” Mr. Esparza says.

Was he in love with this man?

“Yeah, I think I was very much,” he says. “The best thing about him is he made me feel like a great person, no matter what I was doing. He didn’t seem to feel gay or straight was much of an issue.”

Mother, however, very much did. She discovered the affair by reading his journal when he was home on vacation and demanded Mr. Esparza see a therapist.

“He told me my mom would be better off visiting him,” Mr. Esparza says. “He also said he thought I’d be successful, no matter what happened in my life, but that something was wrong with my mother prying in my life.”

Mr. Esparza did not appear entirely comfortable with the experience himself. Two years after graduating, in 1993, he married his high school girlfriend. And, like the character he plays in “Company,” he was able to distance himself from difficult emotional entanglements.

Photo

Raúl Esparza, leaning against the piano in the revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Company."Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“There was a part of me that was trying to get rid of it,” he says of his relationship with a man. “That was saying: ‘That was interesting, that was part of me, but it’s not all of me. I choose, because I love this woman, to marry her.’ It was a little bit naïve of me: That was then, that’s that city, that was an experience and wasn’t that interesting back then? When the truth is, it’s not a person, not a place, not an experience. It’s you, who you are.”

In 1998 his former lover killed himself. Less than two years later, after starring in a 20th anniversary tour of “Evita,” Mr. Esparza came to New York — alone. It was a move he felt he had to make, but had resisted, for years.

Had the death made it safer to come back? “Yes, yeah,” he says. “It also made me look long and hard at myself about all the things I had been hiding from now, and not just about gay/straight, man/woman. I also realized that if I didn’t come to New York, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.”

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He was terrified. But talking about it now he recalls an actor who told him that when you’re doing a play and you’re afraid of a scene, that’s the scene you should embrace, because that’s the scene that will tell you something about the play. Or, in this case, something about yourself. Still, those first months in Manhattan were awful.

“I couldn’t get arrested,” Mr. Esparza says. “I didn’t have any furniture. I had an apartment on 44th Street, sleeping on an air mattress. I had to sleep with the TV and lights on, I was so scared of the dark.”

What did he see when the lights were off?

“I saw this guy, one time, at the foot of the bed laughing at me,” he says, even now not using the words boyfriend or lover. “This dead man, my friend who had killed himself. He was rotten in the dark, laughing at me and how unhappy I was.”

His days were also depressing. Getting coffee at the Marriott Marquis, he saw some actors he knew from “Evita” who were working on Broadway. “I was embarrassed to go say hello because I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a home, my marriage wasn’t the way I wanted it,” he says. “I just stood there with the coffee like there was a wall between me and them.”

Six months later he landed a job in “The Rocky Horror Show” and he was on his way: in the Off Broadway musical “Tick, Tick, Boom!”, for which he won an Obie; in two Sondheim shows at the Kennedy Center in 2002; as the male lead in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” in which, as he’ll tell you, the real star was the flying car.

Then came “Company.” John Doyle (who directed last season’s minimalist “Sweeney Todd”) offered him the role after their first meeting, without even hearing him sing. The casting director, Bernie Telsey, says the lead had to be someone whom all the characters are “a little bit in love with — only if it was love as in really like.” Mr. Doyle prefers to say that Bobby is the character to whom everyone is drawn, “not in the romantic sense, but as a catalyst.”

“Bobby is the man who is on the outside looking in,” he explains. “What’s interesting is that he’s observing, not doing.”

Photo

Mr. Esparza in the musical "Taboo" in 2003.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

As for Mr. Esparza himself, he says: “I think the real thing that Bobby is going through is that he’s trying to grow up, and that means accepting things you can’t change, and it also means that in spite of all the messiness and failure you make a choice to love someone and live your life in the way that’s right for you. It’s messier than the pretty picture you painted for yourself. I had a romantic idea of what it means to be an adult: all husbands and wives who love each other get to stay together forever, love is enough.

“There’s a song in the show, ‘Sorry/Grateful’: ‘You holding her thinking you’re not alone/And you’re still alone.’ I remember with Michele one day holding her in bed and being very, very sad because we were talking about things that were so difficult for us to deal with. I remember feeling like this was a chasm between us. That the person I most loved in my life was as far away as another country, and there was nothing I could do or say to change.”

Mr. Esparza is now involved with an actor — nothing he can talk about, it’s still too tenuous, he says — but his wife is still in his life and, he says, he still adores her.

“We’re still trying to figure a new way to figure it out,” he says. “Boy, are we.”

Mr. Esparza and the man he plays have something else in common: the many people telling them how to live their lives. With his father it’s business advice; with his mother it’s professional. There are friends who still tell him that he and Michele should get back together.

“All this chatter, and I invite it in,” Mr. Esparza says, laughing. “I’m the one who says, ‘You are cordially invited to come to Raúl’s house and tell him everything that is wrong with him.’

“And I just did it to the readers of The New York Times. I’m only now learning not to issue an invitation. I can say you are not allowed to comment on my life.”

How is his family dealing with his sexuality these days?

“Dad doesn’t talk about it,” he says. “Mom used to really hate me for it, call me names and get ugly, but she doesn’t do that anymore. She wants me to be happy.”

Mr. Esparza spoke earlier of embracing the scene that scares you. In “Company” it’s the climactic moment when Bobby sits down at the piano and sings “Being Alive.” And yes, that’s the only thing Mr. Esparza can play on the piano. It’s tough both because of the song’s familiarity and his character’s emotional breakthrough. But he’s also had a rough time with “Marry Me a Little,” which was cut from the original 1970 production.

He talks about the contrast between the rhapsodic music of that song, “which alone can bring tears to your eyes, and laid over it these practical lyrics.” He recites them:

“It seems so practical,” he continues, “It gets me right in the gut. I know what that’s like, to be in a relationship and know there is something seriously wrong here, but I don’t want to acknowledge it, because if I do I’ll have to talk about it. Let’s not talk about it, and it’ll be all right. And you know what? It can be all right for a long time and not just all right, great. And then one day, you’re not.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR5 of the New York edition with the headline: Breaking Character For the First Time In His Life. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe